Increasingly, users install a wide range of applications (also commonly referred to as “apps”) on a wide range of electronic terminals. For example, users install applications on cellular telephones (sometimes called “smart phones”), tablet computers, etc., for literally thousands of purposes. Many situations arise in which one person will share their electronic terminal with another person.
For example, parents will allow their children to play games and use other applications on the parents' electronic terminal. This can result in unwanted pictures being stored in memory of the electronic terminal and inclusion of such pictures in electronic picture organizer/editor applications, undesired changes to application configuration settings, deletion of applications from the memory, downloading of unwanted content to the memory through applications, addition/deletion of web browser bookmarks, etc. Moreover, some changes may not be immediately apparent to the parents, such as when calendared entries are changed/deleted, account information is deleted, or other subtle changes are made to information that is managed by applications. Such changes can motivate parents to avoid allowing such access to their children and others and/or can create anxiety and wasted time for the parents who attempt to identify and undo changes.
Some manufacturers of electronic terminal devices and/or operating systems allow persons to back-up their applications to the cloud (e.g., networked computer systems), such as provided by iCloud from Apple for iOS operating system devices and Google Sync from Google for Android operating system devices. A person can thereby back-up all applications and data to a cloud computer system for a particular time snapshot when the electronic terminal is networked to the cloud computer system, and when desired can restore the electronic terminal to the particular state of applications and data that was previously captured at the particular time snapshot.
Because of the requirement for the electronic terminal to be networked to the cloud computer system during the entire back-up process and restoration process and the relative large amounts of data that is transferred therebetween through the networks, the limited availability of these processes and lengthy time for the processes to be completed results in only occasional use thereof. Consequently, it may be undesirable and perhaps not feasible for a person to restore an electronic terminal to a previous back-up in order to undo changes that occurred from allowing another person to use that electronic terminal.
For these and other reasons, the present processes for protecting and controlling applications and associated data on electronic terminal continues to be unreasonably burdensome to some people and can fail to sufficiently safeguard their interests.